From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe

The Gift

Kleitos Drumfist was laughing at his friend Leander’s victory when the call echoed over the ruins of the Hollows. Quinn Clubfoot, who had just been thrown against the partially standing stone wall of a long dead building, slid limply to the ground. None of the other trolls cared for Clubfoot’s fate as they focused on the signal roar that continued to build in its intensity, passed from one troll to another. That roar stood for only one thing. Atta, their great leader, and his fortress, were under attack. Returning the roar into the bright blue sky of the Hollows, Drumfist took off at a run for the stronghold. Behind them, the puddle of blood grew from underneath Clubfoot’s body. If he was alive when they returned, then he was indeed strong. If he died, then the Tribe had lost a weak member. This was understood by everyone, including Clubfoot.

Kleitos ran as fast as he could. Of all the days for such a thing to happen it would be today, a day that he was not standing guard for the great Atta, a day he had taken to fight and drink with his packmates, his tribe. After a great contest where he had unfortunately had to cripple his friend Arion, he had won a position as one of Atta’s defenders. Kleitos, relying on his wit, cunning, and speed, had bested several other tribe mates who had begun to show powers granted them by the holy drug. The great drug had given him his strength, his size, but truly no obvious powers. It was a matter of speculation at times when the great warrior Kleitos Drumfist would finally be chosen to receive a gift of power. Now, he ran with all his might to defend the king which had shown him so much.

When he arrived, he realized he should have known better. The great Atta rarely needed the aid of his defenders. The great Atta could take care of himself. The intruder was another of the capes from the nearby city. Full of jealousy for the troll nation’s strength, and fear of what Atta might command, they would come into the Hollows. It was a matter of great pride that Kleitos himself had chased away four of these fools and broken three others amongst his patrols along the Gulch. This one, wearing blue, black, and white, a star upon his chest as a target, had tried to face Atta himself. Kleitos had arrived just as the fight was ending, had cheered and jeered as Atta lifted up the blue clad pest and dashed his body against the floor. One of the few to be allowed near the great Atta, Kleitos Drumfist had been one of the first to congratulate his king over the victory. After they removed the body, there would undoubtedly be a great feast.

As he celebrated within a ring of remaining troll defenders, Kleitos happened to look down at the broken body of the blue suited hero. There, next to a ripped pouch lay a small shard of what looked to be a crystal. Something pulled his attention to it and as the noise of the victorious war cries faded away, Drumfist squatted down next to the shard. Time seemed to slow for just a moment as the torchlight flickered off of its angles. Then, Kleitos shook himself and hoping to present it as a trophy to his king, reached down for the crystal. Smiling at the thought of his warlord’s face and thinking what he would say as he presented it, his bare fingers closed around the odd shard.

At that moment, he knew something was wrong.

He should have let go but he could not. Instead, he gripped the form tighter and attempted to stand, his gaze locked onto the crystalline fragment. His hand was tingling. No, it was throbbing and something was very very wrong. A light began to emanate from the shard and only because of a startled sound of alarm from a nearby troll Kleitos looked around briefly. The other troll defenders and Atta, paused in the job of lifting the broken hero’s unconscious body and carrying it to be disposed of in the Gulch, stared at Kleitos. Atta’s eyes went from Kleitos’ face to what he held in his hand and they went wide.

Before the great leader could say anything, Kleitos watched as the shard pulsed brighter with an azure energy and disintegrated into the palm of his hand.

Things happened too fast for Kleitos to completely remember them. Something had flashed over his body, through his body. His muscles had rippled and convulsed. At some point, he had collapsed onto the hard floor his eyes shut tight against the pain and the sensations. The shard was coursing through him, at some points tearing through his soul and at others caressing, massaging. It seemed at odds with something else in him and the fight caused him to fall sideways from his kneeled position. He could not speak, his teeth clenched tightly together. All his focus was inward as blue fire flashed over the inside of his eyelids and white hot lightning seemed to play along the inside of his body. He lost all sense of time but eventually, the sensations faded, rolling away like thunder.

But something began to flash inside his mind, something that felt true and solid and right. For a brief moment, clarity unlike anything he could ever remember struck him. He was not Kleitos Drumfist.

His real name was Joshua, Joshua Caine.

And something else came to him in that moment of perfect and total focus. Since losing his real name he had done very bad things. He could not remember them but he did not have to remember them. He knew.

He opened his eyes to compose himself only to see Atta and the other trolls take in their breath and step backwards. His vision, like looking through an empty blue colored bottle, was filled with a cerulean tint. But, regardless of the hue, he recognized the fear in their faces and fear was something that trolls did not react gently upon.

A member of Atta’s honor guard, he could not remember the guard’s name, stepped in front of Atta, “What did you do, Drumfist? Are you well? Your eyes, they glow. And you are bigger! What did you take from the great Atta’s spoil of war? What did you take that should have strengthened Atta himself? ”

Joshua instinctively staggered to his feet but found he could not speak. He wanted to tell them he had been trying to give his king a gift. It had been an accident. It was all an accident. They had to understand. He was not trying to steal anything. He tried to form words.

“Gift,” was all he able to stammer. “Gift. Nothing… but…. gift.”

Atta glared furiously at his defender and Joshua realized that he was about to be tested. That, in the Troll way, the only way to see if something new was worthy was to fight it, try to kill it. He stumbled backwards knowing what was about to happen and he fled down a hallway that he remembered would lead back to the outside. As he made the doorway to the hall he heard Atta’s command behind him, “Take him.”

When the first trio of trolls caught him at the door to the hills outside, Joshua thought it was all over. He could remember how to fight and he would not go down without one. When the first troll attacked him, he set himself to receive the charge and lay a stunning blow to the troll’s head. The minute he started moving, Joshua knew other things had changed besides his vision.

His muscled bunched, reacted, and a stunning explosion of energy exploded from his fist. A strike which caught the attacking troll in the side of the head, lifting him off the ground, and sending him nearly twenty feet away. Joshua was as stunned as the other attacking trolls to the superhuman display. In the brief seconds it took them to react, Joshua placed a shoulder into one of them and was once again free.

The chase took all day over territory that both he and his pursuers knew all too well. The other trolls were discouraged for awhile when Joshua discovered he could also summon the same energy and shoot it over distances. From then on, they mocked him from a distance, called him a cape, a traitor. They stopped trying to capture him with a straight on pursuit and, fearful of what abilities he might display next, tried to wear him down, to sneak up on him while he attempted to rest.

Fortunately, over that time, he began to recover his original human intelligence. It kept him out of their grasp. He began to understand, at an instinctual level, that the shard and its energy were beginning to work against the years of Superadine he had put into his system. At times, he warred with himself. At times it seemed his memories as Kleitos would take over and he would think of returning to Atta’s court to explain. But then, something else would urge him further towards the Cherry Hills and the guarded entrance to the part of the city called Atlas Park.

He knew better then to directly approach the fortified guard towers and entrance zone. If the gathered heroes did not directly attack him, the city’s robotic sentries would do so automatically. And even the great Atta himself knew better then to try and run past one of the robots. He tried to approach a few single heroes who had been sent out into the ruins near Cherry Hill but they either fled from him or tried to apprehend him. He survived by attacking single Hellions when he could and taking whatever supplies they might have on them. It was rarely enough. Whatever the shard had done to him it had also left him ravenously hungry.

It was in this state, hungry, tired, and dealing with all he had lost as well as gained, that Joshua Caine collapsed in a shadowy corner of a ruined brick building. It was here that the man he would later learn to know as John Talbot found him after following the inner guidance of his own shard. Standing in the dark debris filled alley, Talbot wore the same exact outfit as the man Atta had beaten several days ago, the same outfit of the man who had carried the odd shard which Joshua had absorbed. It was the outfit that made Joshua initially snarl at the man. Growl as he tiredly got to his feet, refusing to be taken as a dog lying in an alleyway.

“Easy, big guy,” Talbot had said, “Easy, I’m here to help you. Tell me, what’s your name?”

The troll once known as Kleitos Drumfist knew the man was speaking the truth. Knew it the same way he knew many things since absorbing the crystalline shard. Things he did not fully understand but knew he would. As he leaned against the brick wall, letting his defenses down for the first time in two full days, he spoke with a voice he was not sure was his own.

“My name…. is… Joshua. Joshua Caine.”

“Come on, Joshua,’ spoke the man in blue and black with the white star as a target, “let’s get you out of here and someplace safe.”

Joshua, exhausted, nodded and followed the man past the sentry robots, the other heroes and policeman that gathered and stared at the troll being led from the Hollows not as a prisoner but as someone once again free. Battling some inner battle, Joshua stopped before entering Atlas Park and looked back over the broken landscape of the Hollows one last time. There was much he was leaving behind but something swirled in him and he knew there was much more in front of him. With a trollish and decisive snort, he strode over the threshold into Atlas Park.